Archive for 2013

ShareTweet Last week myself and my UK-based fellow SEO Chicks spoke at the Digital Marketing Show at Londons’ Excel. Our panel discussion was on Technical SEO, with each of us leading a few slides on one main topic; detailing the best-practise concerns and of course, the most common mistakes. Here are the slides from the day and our twitter handles precede each section so feel free to tweet us if you have any technical questions.

ShareTweet For many of us working in technical SEO for an agency, the first stage of any new client win is to perform a site audit. Whilst many agencies will have their own procedures most experienced professionals will start with crawl-related checks and research. If a site (and pages therein) can’t be crawled, then they won’t appear in any search engine index and if there’s nothing indexed, then there’s nothing to optimise. (So let’s all go home and play CoD.) As part of the checks and diagnostic procedures we make sure to cover at theMediaFlow, we have a look at any reported crawl errors in Google or Bing Webmaster Tools. I want to share with you a recent example of [...]

ShareTweet I recently had the opportunity to attend a conference on digital engagement in the arts sector. The conference took place in Brighton and was hosted by Culture24. Culture24 is a non-profit organisation with a mission “to support the cultural sector in reaching online audiences”. The conference was in some sense a launch event for their newest research, in the form of a report titled Let’s Get Real 2. [Quick sidenote: The first Let's Get Real report was released in 2011, and became the starting point for an 11-month research project which brought together 22 cultural organisations to learn about "the practical use of technologies to gather data and how to draw meaningful insights from this". The result of this research is the Let's Get Real [...]

ShareTweet Recently we’ve seen several SEOs fussing about not getting paid, resorting to outing the offenders. Everyone’s favorite Dutchman-in-Ireland Barry Adams wrote “How I’ve Been Shafted By Darryl Collins from Banjax and Gingerparts” (which sounds so much like a revenge porn title) and the comment section is completely full of people coming forward to say that they’ve either also been shafted by Mr. Collins (that is so hard to type without giggling) or that it’s been a problem for them with someone else. Suffice it to say, it IS a problem. In my Link Club, we’ve recently discussed how to avoid this and let me tell you, it’s definitely a huge problem and I’m still trying to collect on an account [...]

ShareTweet Mobile traffic, mobile websites, mobile apps. These and similar phrases are increasingly being discussed in SEO circles, but sometimes (and I am as guilty of this as anyone) we forget to define what we actually mean by the term ‘mobile’. The Official Definition The Mobile Marketing Association recently defined ‘mobile marketing’ as “a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through and with any mobile device or network.” [emphasis mine] But to the average person (at least here in the UK), ‘mobile’ is a synonym for ‘cell phone’. No one says, ‘let me look it up on my mobile’ and then takes out an iPad. Tablets, smartphones [...]

ShareTweet In 2007 I was much more obnoxious (and had more free time) and I wrote a post about whether chimps could take over our jobs. I’m still sure that they could definitely perform certain functions in this industry, besides being DAMNED cute even if they are fairly deadly, but what about some of the new roles that have come about or gotten more important in the past 5 1/2 years? Could a chimp do those too? Damn right she could. Content Marketing Create sites that are great and useful, totally relevant, and constantly updated with new and brilliant content that people love, socialize, and editorially link to? Um, no, [...]